Juxtafixation
by miss selah
Summary: Kagome is having a relationship with a word. [NarKag] [TWT] [VERY bitter chocolate]


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**Juxtafixation**

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_Sometimes you scrape and sink so low / I'm shocked at what you're capable of._

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**.01**

Her hair is duller than it used to be, that shine is long since gone. It falls in limp, oily waves but it probably has more to do with the fact that she's been here for _eight months _and less to do with her secret. At least, that would be the case if her secret didn't directly have an effect on her indefinite stay in the fuedal era. and her eyes are sunken, and if she could find a mirror she might have been shocked at how much she was beginning to look like Kikyou. She had never really seen the similarities before; Kagome shined from within and Kikyou stepped lightly through the world. It only made sense that now that Kikyou was dead and Kagome had integrated herself in to her position completely, she would begin to look less like herself and more like a reflection of her position. A position tht her traveling party - whom had only just now begun to see the differences - were blissfully unaware of.

It's been there all along.

Maybe they already saw it.

Maybe they didn't want to say anything.

Maybe the spell she seemed to cast over everyone was too potent, too intoxicating, for them to see the present when they were so damn blinded by the past.

Maybe they just never cared to look.

Or maybe they've seen it all along. Maybe they just didn't want to say. Maybe they really didn't want to look.

"Kagome, if there's something bothering you -" Sango begins, but is stopped short when Kagome snaps at her.

"I'm fine." There is something in her voice, a length of cord that shivers, saying something that her eyes wont. Cant. Wont.

"But you-"

"I'm fine."

She leaves them then, on the perspice of returning to her own time, but she really just wanders aimlessly through the dark moors until she hears a baby crying nearby, and then a guttural cry, and then silence. She smiles.

"Na. Ra. Ku." She rolls the 'r' sound, savoring it as it passes her lips. She rolls it on her tongue again, and when he approaches her, she is sucking on it like an ice pop.

She's having an affair, he tells her jokingly, with a word.

She doesn't smile because the truth is rarely that funny.

**.02**

"But you've been acting very strange lately, it's not hard to imagine why we're all so worried about you, is it?"

She used to be such a good girl.

Now she stares at Miroku's hand, his hell hand, and she can see it, see the curse inside of him that is eating him up slowly, taking one savoring lick at a time as though it was a piece of chocolate and not a human soul at all. She sees his anger, sees how it powers it, and knows that he's plotting, even now, to get rid of it. Rid of him.

She used to be such a good girl.

Good girls don't fuck murderers.

"I'm fine."

She was so tired of being a good girl, because all it brought her was a broken future and a broken soul and she wondered if 'good' wasn't just another word for 'gone.'

**.03**

The smell of sweat isn't as strong as the smell of sex but is at least twice as potent as the smell of blood.

It's intoxicating, the same way his touch and kisses and agony is intoxicating.

"Na. Ra. Ku." She sounds out the syllables, and when she's laying in the dirt where she belongs and he's standing over her like he always has, she takes a stick and draws his name out in spider-web kanji. Beneath it, she puts her own, being sure to emphasize the syllables so it doesn't read _Kagome_, because she's too broken for a name that whole. Ka. Go. Me.

Na. Ra. Ku.

Sounding out the syllables, she can see the similarities. Or maybe she's just thinking in metaphors again.

"They're almost the same." She whispers to him as he kneels down to see her work, more affectionately than not.

"No, they aren't."

She frowns so prettily it's almost better than a smile. Almost.

She swipes a hand through the pretty kanji, pushing up dust and debris and so many old memories that she is afraid for a second that she has drowned in deja vu. She takes a steadying breath and reminds herself that she is past being scared of silly things like the dark and the centipedes that can crawl out of wells. She reminds herself that she has nothing left to lose, which was the whole reason she sought him out in the first place anyways.

Her hand has left a smear right between them, a rift, and the names are transformed in to something so foreign and unreadable that she doesn't even bother. Not this time. Not ever.

"No, they aren't." She parrots.

**.04**

Na. Ra. Ku.

Noun.

Hell.

He looked so beautiful there, standing over the corpses of people who had once called her friend, so beautiful like an angel.

Lucifer was an angel, too. The most beautiful angel of all. Only he didn't have a heart, but somehow he had ended up with a _soul, _and that was at least ten times worse. A heart can break. A soul can only be manipulated.

And that _hurts. _

"I love you." He isn't saying it; her Na-Ra-Ku would never say something like that. Onigumo, yes, but she wasn't fucking Onigumo.

She smiled at him almost viciously. "You need a _heart _to love something."

And then Na-ra-ku was back, eyes vicious and cold.

Or maybe that was her own image being reflected back at her. Yes; she liked that idea.

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Miss Selah: I'd rather not discuss this one.

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End file.
